Should faux fur replace the real deal?

Generation green is fighting off non-biodegradable plastic while dressed in it disguised as faux fur

We’re living in a plastic world. Quite literally. We have too much plastic andwe don’t know how to get rid of it – it’s either pilling up on landfills orfloating around the ocean – but it’s not going away. As companies, such asCoca-Cola is working on making its plastic bottles completely recycable by 2030and Johnson & Johnson are switching from plastic to paper cotton buds, thefashion industry is welcoming plastic into the world of luxury concealed under alabel of faux fur.

A shift towards an anti-fur fashion industry became apparent when fashion-giantGucci last fall announced its distance from fur, only to be joined by brandssuch as Versace, Donna Karan and latest Maison Margiela.

“With leading luxury brands including Gucci, Versace and Tom Ford announcing amove to fur-free, we are expecting to see a massive shift in the fashionindustry following their influence,” says Rebecca Wallace content manager atPositive Luxury, an online platform promoting positive consumption andsustainable brands.

And the change hasn’t only been limited to the brands. At the beginning of thisyear Norway pledged to close its fur farms by 2025 making it the first Nordiccountry to do so while UK MP’s are looking to completely ban the import of fur.Likewise, San Francisco will be the first major US city to completely ban salesof fur by January 2019.

“Ethical fashion has become the top priority for the new breed of consumers, andtherefore also for the entire supply chain,” Wallace argues. “Millennials viewthemselves as global citizens with a responsibility to live more ethically andsustainably, and are deeply into the brands and companies they purchase from,expecting full disclosure of their values and practices. Many luxury brands haverealised this, and are taking strive to connect with the new wave of consciousconsumers by going fur-free.”

And while these initiatives indicate a more united fashion industry standingagainst cruelty and unreasonable killings of animals, anti-fur hasn’t exactlyimplied fur-less with several designers opting for the plastic replacementinstead.

The man-made material featured in Gucci’s latest resort collection and was alsoheavily visible on the fall 2018 catwalk at Givenchy, a brand that has equallydeclared its goodbyes to animal pelts. On top of that the phenomenon has greetedhigh-end faux fur designer brands such as Shrimps and Charlotte Simone.

And it is not without reason, consumer demand for faux fur has increased 10 percent over the last couple of years suggesting the material as the next bigbusiness.

However, faux fur might not involve the use of animals but it is madepredominantly from non-biodegradable plastic materials giving it a complicatedlifecycle. The assumption that a shift to faux fur is equivalent of a shift tosustainability is therefore not entirely true since fake fur wasn’t created as asustainable option. In fact, it wasn’t even made to save animals. Originally thematerial was created as a fast and cheap substitute to imitate luxury fur of theupper-class centuries ago.

“It used to be called fun-fur, and some of it was hideous actually,” Sandy Blackrecalls. She’s a professor of Fashion Textile Design and Technology who workswith Centre for Sustainable Fashion to create awareness around the environmentalimpact of fashion.

“Natural doesn’t equal good and synthetic doesn’t equal bad. It’s not assimplistic as that,“ she argues. “It’s animals versus minerals, and there isn’talways one answer. We have to look at it holistically. It’s easy to pick up oneissue and think good or bad but I feel that’s too naïve. There needs to be muchmore information and then consideration.”

Although there is a current rise in the use of fake fur it hasn’t completelyended the sale of animal fur. The fur industry still turn over a double-digitsbillion revenue yearly. Indeed, none of the brands relying on fur sales hasconveyed to its synthetic opponent. Although the move from Gucci was considereda turning point, fur sales only accounted for piddling 0.16 per cent of thebrand’s turnover last year.

Instead of persuading fur regulars faux fur caters for a new consumer-base whowould never touch animal fur to begin with. Rather than resolving the furproblem a move to fake fur leaves us with two furry dilemmas.

“While faux fur caters for a new consumer base of Millennials and Gen Z, whobelieve in positive fashion, real fur is unlikely to disappear from fashioncompletely,” Wallace says. “It is somewhat similar to the vegan versusvegetarian debate – meat eaters still exist, just like fur wearers do.”

Fur has a culture in many countries as being a symbol of status and wealth. Ofcourse, the idea of wearing animal skins stems back from when our ancestors usedto hunt animals for food, but later it turned into a product reserved for royalsand the mere elite, outlining the luxury standing of the material. By thebeginning of the nineteenth-century fur moved into Hollywood and became a stapleof the trophy wives giving weight for the production of cheaper faux fur copiesfor people of lesser rank.

“It’s about what fur does for people,” Black argues. “We have to look more atthe cultural aspect as to why they want it in the first place because I thinkthat’s difficult to substitute with a synthetic of any kind. What you get fromthe physical quality of fur is very hard to replicate.”

Naomi Bailey-Cooper, a PhD candidate researching alternative embellishments toexotic animal materials such as fur, agrees that the fake fur options currentlyon the market might not appeal to neither fur-buying customers or designersworking with fur. She suggests the industry start looking for otherreplacements. “Many fur alternatives focus on an engineered aesthetic replicaproduct rather than opening up and exploring other appealing factors that furhas,” she says.

“I think there could be a product which accommodates both sustainability andanimal rights issues. You see this being developed in leather alternatives suchas Modern Meadow and leathers from waste such as Vegea and Frumat. So there is alot of work that can be done for furs and other types of animal materials too,”Bailey-Cooper acknowledges.

Faux fur might save the animals but if it ends up killing the planet instead weneed another alternative because as we’re learning; there really is no suchthing as plastic fantastic.